Month: November 2015

Calendars hot off the press!

Our 2016 Garden Calendars are ready to buy. They are full of tips, planting schedules, planting dates we use at Loutet Farm, and kids activity ideas. They are a great holiday present for the gardeners in your life, and all the proceeds from the calendars support the Edible Garden Project’s programs to build gardens, grow fresh food, and teach all ages.

The Elder’s Gathering place is a grassroots initiative created by Skundaal (Bernie Williams) – Haida Nation, and Dan Wallace – Lekwaiktaich & Haida Nations. Our goal is to utilize Skundaal & Dan’s art studio at the Sacred Circle located at 33 Cordova St. W as a gathering place for Elders. Our main concerns are that elders living in and around Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) are not having their daily nutritional requirements met for many reasons. Poverty is the main reason, but this is also exacerbated by elder abuse, accessibility issues and traditional food items being replaced by processed foods that are unhealthy. We plan to not only feed elders, but also to build community by facilitating an all nations drum circle as well as other cultural activities.

At first, our priority will be to take care of indigenous elders by gaining access to and redistributing traditional foods in addition to organic fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Once we have built up our capacity the “Elders’ gathering place” will be able to serve all elders regardless of their ethnic backgrounds.

Our focus at this time is getting a kitchen and dining space set up so that we can cook and serve food for elders on a monthly basis. Considering that there are ample services, dinners and give aways during December, ideally our first “Elders’ Feast & Give Away” would be in mid January so that we can help subsidize elders’ food needs between cheque issue dates.

We anticipate that once we are set up, we will have enough wild and fresh food donations to preserve and stock our shelves with to have a pantry full of healthy organic foods. We have already received some donations of clothing, small coffee machine, small freezer, an electric kettle and one hot plate. We will need much more before we can get started though.

Kicked off this year’s school gardening program recently with a seed saving workshop thanks to Matthew Kemshaw and the Environmental Youth Alliance. Lots of really interesting information that kept the students quite engaged and attentive.

Currently working with three secondary classes this year as well as the grade 3 and 4s. Will have the students out in the garden about every three or four weeks for some hands on learning.